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Paul Wesley

Certifiably Surly
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  1. Ha ha - I appreciate that you put "music producer" in sarcasm quotes. I agree with you and with jimmyjazz: Apparently the bar for giving yourself that title is super fucking low. Like, buy some prosumer speakers and hang an acoustic guitar in the background of your web stream. To start off with "I don't even know what genre this is" when discussing one of the top-5 selling records in history... wow. Most actual music producers would have to go several hundred deep into the all-time best-seller list before they'd admit that they couldn't even assign the artist to a genre/genres. That guy made it to number four (and I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's ever heard of Michael Jackson or AC/DC... which definitely may not be true).
  2. That's probably a great choice for a beginner guitar.
  3. I just tell people I've been here long enough that I get to bitch about how bad traffic has gotten.
  4. Yeah, I think this is the biggest part of the answer. The goal of getting signed to a label used to be (by far) the major hurdle for any artist. If you got signed, it gave you credibility. Once you were signed, the industry machine will make sure your record gets reviewed in print and online. The label will (in part) help arrange and advertise your tour. As an artist, you've at least got *some* kind of shot at being heard and rising above the noise. I'm not sure how much any of that is true these days... and I don't think there's anyone who REALLY knows what the model is. You definitely don't need a label to get your music onto the streaming platforms. And maybe those thousands of dollars the band was going to spend to come to Austin could be spent making a creative video, paying influencers to promote on TikTok, putting on an "outsider" sort of show/tour for yourself, etc. So now, why would an artist fly to Austin? And if the most promising bands with buzz and momentum aren't coming, then why would a music fan pay HUGE sums of money for a ticket? The whole thing unravels pretty quickly.
  5. It's been a few years since I bought a guitar (I know, I know), but I just broke that streak with a 12-string that will get here next week. I've always thought 12-strings were amazing. When I was 12 or 13, one of the old kids at church ("old" = 16 or 17) brought one, and when I heard him play it, I remember thinking, "Why would anyone play a 6-string when you could play this?" My very first guitar - a few months later - was a cheap 12-string Alvarez... which in hindsight was an extremely hard-to-play guitar, and a terrible choice for a first guitar. I still feel like - in a way that's not at all true for 6-strings - there's a spectrum between "plays well" (the Taylor 655 that I owned for a decade and sold) and "sounds glorious" (the Martin DM 12 that I still own and keep strung as a Nashville high-string guitar). Anyway, Taylor started making a 12-fret 12-string. Allegedly the shorter scale addresses a couple of those problems. Smaller body and shorter scale = not so gigantic and unwieldy. Also, shorter scale = slightly less string tension, so (theoretically) a lot easier to play barre chords. We'll see.
  6. That is a truly terrible idea. It's plan that's tailor-made to get slaughtered by right-wing propaganda (e.g. Fox News). "Look at the libs who hate America - wearing another country's flag and walking out like little snowflakes. Hahahahaha!"
  7. I think y'all are missing the purpose of the rug. Look carefully at how many pedals are down there just kind of blending in. Think about how easy it would be for a spouse to miss those. It's fucking genius.
  8. I am hearing you say "TwoRock Studio Pro 35," and yes, you should.
  9. "Upside down and backwards!!!" I just heard that description on a podcast, applied to another lefty guitarist who restrung a right-handed guitar... with the net result that he's playing the guitar pretty much the same way as everyone else. Stop it already. (trivial things that make you surly)
  10. God bless Anderson Cooper for this. 99% of the time politicians go on those shows and lie, they get little or no pushback from the host because the network knows they'll never get that person (or any spokesperson for the party they represent) on again. As a result, outright lies and disingenuous arguments get treated the same as good-faith engagement. For whatever reason, Cooper felt unrestrained here to give the appropriate response... especially the last 10 seconds or so.
  11. There are definitely a lot of great mix engineers out there. It's not that. My short answer: Real music - like real life - has to have a lot of moment-to-moment variation in volume. That's dynamic range: the difference between the quiet instant and the loud moment (like a drum hit). Great mixes have a lot of dynamic range. But here's the tension: What you perceive as "volume" or "loudness" isn't the volume of those quick, transient moments (like a drum hit). Instead, it's sort of the *average* across time of how much power/energy the music has. So if you were scrolling through Apple Music or Spotify, and one song kept a lot more dynamic range than the rest, it would instantly sound really weak/soft/quiet compared to everything else. An artist can make his song louder by giving *all* of the moments more volume/energy. But when you do that, it's at the expense of dynamic range. And here's the important thing: music without dynamic range takes on a harsh, constant, buzz. And squashing the dynamic range MUST introduce some level of distortion, where the sound waves get clipped or squared-off instead of their natural sine shape. Music without dynamic range is fatiguing... like a chain saw. This phenomenon is exactly why commercials are both 1) louder, and 2) sonically obnoxious and annoying. Anyway, it's been hard to stop. Since dynamic range compression (a big part of mastering) will change the way something sounds, mix engineers will preemptively squash their mixes before the mastering engineers even get it. Mastering engineers complain that they can't "master" something that already has no dynamic range. Artists who get their mix back and then audition it against all the modern music out there will complain that their song is way too quiet and needs to be louder. The problem has saturated pretty much every form of music consumption with the exception of vinyl. Streaming services use algorithms to level off everyone's music to the same loudness, so even artists who fight to keep dynamic range in their mixes will get their shit SQUASHED in the final step of consumption, and there's nothing they can do about it. Terrestrial radio is the worst. Radio stations want to be LOUDER than the next one on the dial, so they add insane amounts of leveling that sounds absolutely awful. I would argue that all of this is one of the major reasons why music has fallen off the map of importance. It's consumed in ways (no dynamic range) where it has no chance to deliver a powerful, transcendent experience with an emotional punch. Sorry for the long response. I'm sure the engineers can take issue with my use of words like "power, volume, level, loudness" - those words each have very precise scientific definitions that aren't interchangeable... but you get the idea. This quick video gives a pretty good visual representation:
  12. The band that gave us my favorite Beavis and Butthead moment:
  13. I saw her there in either 84 or 85, with Joe Walsh opening (turns out they were an item at the time, but I don't think the public knew that).
  14. There are worse mistakes to make when you're 17. That one's not gonna message you on Ancestry.com.
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